Many automated attendants, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, name dialers and voicemail systems use speech recognition as an alternative to dual tone multiple frequency (DTMF) menu navigation. More specifically, speech recognition technology allows a caller to speak, e.g., voice commands and/or a person's name rather than pressing DTMF keys on a telephone to select commands and “spell” a person's name. Such technology is especially useful for identifying users since spelling a person's name using DTMF keys can be quite difficult. That is, not only is it time consuming to find the correct letters that are grouped on individual keys on the DTMF keypad, but often times the caller might not even know how to spell the person's name. Moreover, in some situations, it may be dangerous to force a caller to enter a person's name via the keypad. For instance, the caller may be using a mobile telephone while driving, and it would be unsafe for the driver to pay attention to dialing/pressing keys. Thus, there has been a trend to increasingly rely on speech recognition system technology over DTMF approaches.
Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for speech recognition systems to do a relatively poor job of accurately recognizing, in particular, some peoples' names. When a caller speaks a person's name or any other speech, the speech recognition system records the sound, attempts to phonetically break the sound down into, for example, syllables or other phonetic segments and then match appropriate spellings to the syllables or segments, thus resulting in a text string. That text string, however, may, in fact, have very little resemblance to the actual spelling of the intended person's name.